Well I'd say they want to be sure they have the real person who owns the accounts in front of them and they can't be sure. The CPanel usually provides you with access to databases and all the domain settings. So if you want to do bad this is the absolute best way to go to get sites down usually.

Hmm, yeah this is not the best position you want to be in. I would make sure that your Web site is listed in both Google Webmaster Tools as Bing Webmaster Tools. If you already are I would also really submit my sitemaps like 20 times to be sure that Google is aware that your pages need to be recrawled again in the hope that they then also will index them again and hope they will put them back on their old positions.

Hi Richard,

Are you able to share the site we're talking about here? That would make it easier for us to help you with feedback on the specific example.

Hi Nico,

As you said it's far from prefect but I would indeed go with using a canonical on the pages that have duplicate variants. But if you're doing this already then it might be not that much more effort to also link them back on the back-end of your site so you can do more advanced things.

It could, I would say it's depending on how large of a brand you are in the space that you want to rank for. In tons of cases for bigger brands, it makes more sense to add their brand name to the title of the page in the SERP as it will have a higher awareness of people who are already familiar with it and that's why it'll increase their CTR. In most cases, I would say that it's better to test this assumption at a larger scale to see what the actual impact is of removing/adding the brand name.